Every day I go out into the world and am forced to battle with a 90-pound beast during her relentless quest to consume all varieties of fecal matter.
I never remember my childhood dogs eating shit. Perhaps they did, and I was too busy building snow tunnels or running away from giant moose to notice such happenings. Growing up on an acreage, I was subjected to many gross farm-things, so it’s difficult to remember all the horrible things that went on in those adolescent years.
Last summer, my son Lars was at my brother’s hobby farm, and as he was closing the chicken coop, he inadvertently stepped on a tiny chick, crushing it to smithereens.
I think smithereens is the wrong word to use. It was more like goopereens. Yes, he crushed the baby chicken to goopereens.
This past Christmas, when we were back at the farm visiting, my brother and sister-in-law invited Lars to join them this upcoming summer to help with processing the meat chickens when the time comes.
“I think it will be interesting for you, Lars,” Ashley, my sister-in-law, said.
I guess they figured he already had slaughtering experience, so they may as well get some work out of the kid.
It wasn’t until I was 14 and at a friend’s house that I saw a dog eat its own shit. It was horrendous. We were suntanning in the backyard, and as I gazed over at the dog sniffing around a rather large pile of poo, I realized that he might eat that shit right off the ground.
And then he did. Gobbled it right up.
Jesus.
“What the hell, man!” I said to his owner. “Are you starving that dog? Why is he forced to eat his own poop!?” At the sound of my outrage, the dog sauntered over to me and forcefully licked my lips.
“Some dogs, just do that. They eat shit.”
“Well, all I know is I’d never have a dog that ate shit,” I replied in a very, I’ll be eating these shit words one day, sort of way.
Two decades later, I am wrangling Lucy away from the deer pellets that sully our green spaces in the city. Lucy becomes ravenous when it comes to the sweet, sweet tang of butt-mud.
See this: a 30-something woman enjoying a relaxing walk with her lovely German shepherd, and then, out of nowhere, the poor woman’s arm has been violently dislocated, and there’s the dog, running off into the distance while chomping down the most enormous stink pickle you’ve ever seen.
The strange thing I’ve noticed when trying to avoid the piles of hot sloppies peppered throughout my community is the sheer variety we’re dealing with.
There’s the deer pellets: piles of tiny round droplets that seem, in the grand scheme of things, pretty vanilla when it comes to chowing down on the stuff.
If forced to eat feces, I would opt for deer shit. It must be the cleanest due to the deer’s choice of a vegetarian lifestyle.
Fellow dog doo: You can tell it’s another dog’s shit because all dog shit looks the same. Unless the dog is direly sick, which, like humans, results in a mess of butt sludge. A Charlie and the Chocolate Factory situation, if you will.
The mysterious brown bomber: this scatological marvel occurs while I am examining (from a distance) all the shit on these shit-strewn sidewalks and cannot identify a particular specimen.
It falls into no category. It is, indeed, a conundrum. Is there some type of large animal I am unaware of that’s roaming the city streets at night? Do the heavens sometimes rain down shit-clouds without my knowledge?
The poop patty mystery continues. More at 6.
The worst, however, is when I come across human shit. Oh, the number of times I’ve been walking and nearly stepped on a perfect backdoor beauty laid thoughtfully in the middle of the sidewalk. I don’t know why my city contains so much human shit, but it certainly is more abundant here than anywhere else I’ve lived.
It’s a real problem.
And Lucy goes crazy for the stuff. Sometimes, she manages to get it — that’s when I lose all composure, and as my dog, who regularly licks my face, chomps away on a thick turd nugget, I begin gagging and dry heaving uncontrollably.
When I say I’m forced to battle my dog daily on the shit front, what I really mean is that it’s a losing battle. When it comes to eating succulent stools, that girl has a one-track mind.
You put up with so much shit....